Mech Pilot who is trapped in cycles of guilt. It is true that I killed my mentor, and yet I am not their murderer…
The dagger drops from head height to stick in the cheap laminate tabletop, point down, hilt standing dead straight and undeniable, and Shine...ignores it.
"You killed Qo Scanlon!" says a voice quivering with youthful, indignant outrage. "I demand—" and then chokes off when Shine finally looks up from the steaming cup of bitter bark-infusion she is beginning her morning with. She rakes fathomless eyes over a high-collared student coat, the spots of colour on angry cheeks, clenched fists, then reaches out a finger.
The dagger is a single piece of alloy, blade tinted ombré from edge to edge, black to midnight blue. A shallow indentation meanders fluidly along most of the blade's length, reproduction of a single calligraphic stroke. The dip-tint gives way to bare metal at the guard; the hilt has a slot machined through it, retaining an allusive linear constellation of precious stones. Shine lightly touches the pearl and the sapphire, and then withdraws.
"I demand satisfaction," the girl finishes, stridency transmute to something more muted, perhaps with a tinge more fear than anger.
"I have no intention of killing you, too," says Shine, and the girl quivers in freshened rage.
"Answer me or be a fool and a coward!" she spits, and the corner of Shine's mouth curls upward, bitterer than the tea.
"I'm already the fool who killed Qo Scanlon," she says, level and cool. "You didn't know Qo. You're a dramatic child who knows some brilliant poetry and the eloquent mourning of a million brilliant friends. I knew Qo. I miss him every day."
"You murdered him!"
Shine's lips compress, and she gives the hilt of the dagger a dismissive flick. "Exactly as much as you intend to murder me," she says. "Duelling law says it's not...if they deserved it." She smoothes the collar of her mourning jacket, picks up her cup between her hands, and re-plants her elbows on the table in her previous attitude of contemplation. "He'd appreciate the gesture," she adds, thinly sardonic. "He had — a liking, for dramatic children carried away by the love of his poetry."
In a neat, controlled way, she sits and sips and ignores the dagger.
"Coward," the girl says, but it's fallen now to a mutter, propelled mostly by reluctance to release the dregs of bravely-stoked outrage, and there's a curl of uncertainty worming through underneath it.
"He earned it," Shine says, with a chasm of cold ferocity under her quiet voice.